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Chris and Paul Weitz reunite to adapt Martha Wells’s much-loved The Murderbot Diaries into sci-fi series Murderbot for Apple TV+

- TARA BENNETT

THE FIRST REFERENCE TO A “robot” in literature came in 1920 when Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term in his drama RUR to describe artificial workers that eventually overthrow their human creators. Over a hundred years later, there have been countless iterations of robots in books, films and television series, usually either protecting humanity, or just wiping them out.

In 2017, award-winning science-fiction author Martha Wells tweaked that trope with her character Murderbot, a firmly human-indifferent, media binge-watching robot, who narrates the writer's The Murderbot Diaries series of novels and short stories.

In its space-faring future, Murderbot is a SecUnit (security unit) so apathetic about its job protecting miners that it spends its down time mainlining the soap opera The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, after it surreptitiously hacks its own governor module – which prevents it from harming humans – and bides its time waiting for the perfect opportunity to escape its assignment, peacefully or not.

Academy Award-nominated writer/director Paul Weitz (American Pie) tells Red Alert that he fell in love with Wells's Murderbot character, recognising in its DNA shades of Douglas Adams's Marvin The Paranoid Android, Star Trek's Spock and even Voltaire's Candide. He passed the book to his brother, Chris Weitz (